Phil Ayres is an online marketer and the Director of Web Strategy for the Professional Education Institute, in the Chicago area. Phil is a graduate of the University of Tennessee College of Law and Vanderbilt University.
Today, I logged into my Google Webmaster tools account. If you don't have one, you need one! They have have added a "labs" section, containing some great tools for detecting malware on your site and a tool to help you see pages as Googlebot sees them. Very interesting stuff.
Today, it seems like everyone I come across is trying to peddle a solution to getting your business ranked in the search engines. Many are giving decent advice. Many are not. And, many of them are giving information as they would “like” reality to be, rather than what it is.
I signed up for a great new service, yesterday. It is called Gist.com. Think of Gist as being a mini and free SalesForce.com. It doesn’t have a lot of the features that Salesforce has. But, for a free product, you can’t beat it.
Essentially, Gist takes contacts from your different social media accounts like Twitter, Linkedin, Salesforce, Facebook and imports them into Gist.com. Then, it takes your gmail contacts and you outlook contacts and imports those.
From there, it gives you quality information and news aggregated about those contacts and the companies that they work for. I think this is a valuable business development tool because it enables you to manage all of your free contacts and quickly have access to information on those people and the companies that they work for. For the price (free), you can’t beat it.
Alright, maybe, this guy should not have a kid. This guy is probably not qualified to to have a kid if they would be willing to name his kid Batman, in return for fans.
I think this will be a fantastic new Facebook feature. I can see a lot of benefits to this. You could use it to chat with friends… you could use it for informal meetings. You could even use it to communicate with groups in a podcast format. Interesting possibilities.
I knew that Ocho wouldn't give up easily. I know he has something else up his sleeve. So, apparently, the NFL rules will not allow either him or an "agent" of his to Tweet during the game. But, does that preclude him from using a scheduled Tweeting service like Tweetlater.com?
Obama cautioned our nation's youth about what they say and do on Facebook. He is definitely right. Monitoring your online exposure will be critical in the future. However, I think that we will more toward a future where people are more accepting of the shortcomings of our leaders. I think that since Bill Clinton the world has become more desensitized to the fact that our politicians our not perfect.
You shouldn't have to be the picture of perfection to be a political leader. And, frankly, if I couldn't find someone in social media (a future candidate) depicted in some less that wonderful way… I would think that is strange. Because, if someone makes every effort to be not depicted in a certain light, they are probably too "stuffy" and "boring" to relate to people anyway. So, hey, lighten up. Politicians don't have to be pictures of perfection. It shouldn't be that way. We shouldn't expect that of them. Besides, you can only control so much of your social profile online. You may not put a certain picture up… but others might!The future of Dan Thies at Stompernet. Huge changes going on there…
I already sent something out to my newsletter subscribers about this, but thought it was worth a post too.
Yesterday was my last day on the job as a staff member at StomperNet. This has actually been in the works for a while, it's just taken some time to hand off a whole plateful of responsibilities to different people and work out all the details.
Actually, I've still got one more little project to finish but I'm doing this one "on the house" because it's the primary reason why I took the job in the first place.
For example, if a faculty member sleeps in until noon on a Monday, nobody's going to notice. If the Chief Experience Officer does that, they call and wake him up, long before noon rolls around. 
(like, at 9:01 am Eastern time – which is 8:01 here. Seriously.)
Having a job was fun sometimes, and sometimes it sucked. Mostly, it took too much time away from what I am actually good at and enjoy doing – like research and teaching.
Well, about half of it belongs to my family. The rest will go into some new projects** that I've been trying to "find time" for – and some old projects that always seemed to get put on the shelf over pressing work responsibilities.
Meanwhile, the "new StomperNet" is just about ready for public consumption, and it's going to have a very broad appeal.
When they say that internet marketing is going to change forever, well, you could call that hyperbole if you like, but I've seen what's coming. If you have a web site, you will want to be paying attention on September 9th.
**(details coming sooner than later)
If you have a site, no doubt you have checked out your Compete.com numbers. I have grown increasingly frustrated with that site and how worthless the numbers are. They aren't just "off"… they are so wrong that it is absurd. I give you this example.
Listen to this video. They quote that MetsBlog.com has 500K visitors/month… now look at the Compete data. Worthless is the only word I can think of. I am done with that site.
